What is Capture Australia?

Capture Australia is a photo digitisation service that scans printed photos and albums using proprietary glare-removal technology. We work with a network of partner shops in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Customers drop off their albums or loose prints at a local partner shop, and the shop handles the scanning before returning the originals safely.

Where do I get my photos scanned?

Capture Australia operates through partner shops in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. You bring your albums or loose prints to the nearest partner location, leave them for scanning, and collect them once the job is done. Visit captureaus.com/where-to-scan to find your closest shop and its opening hours.

What technology does Capture Australia use to remove glare?

Capture Australia uses a proprietary 8-layer glare-removal process. The scanner captures multiple exposures of each photo through the album plastic sleeve, then processes those layers to strip out glare and reflections. The output is a clear, detailed digital copy, produced without ever removing the photo from the album.

Do my photos need to come out of the album?

No. The scanning technology works through album plastic sleeves and pages, so your photos stay exactly where they are throughout the process. There is no risk of tearing, bending or damaging the originals at any point.

What sizes of photos does Capture Australia scan?

Capture Australia scans printed photos across a wide range of sizes. Small wallet prints, standard 4x6 inch and 5x7 inch photographs, 8x10 portraits and larger prints up to and including large format scanning of framed portraits and artworks, with a capture area of up to 45cm x 70cm. The proprietary scanning equipment is physically installed at each partner shop, built specifically to handle this full size range without removing photos from their sleeves, albums or frames. The same 8-layer glare-removal technology applies at every scale, so the digital output is sharp and consistent whether the print is a pocket-sized snap or a large framed portrait or artwork. Slides, negatives and film require different equipment and some partner shops like Photoland, Camera House and Retromedia offer these services. The wider Capture group covers those formats outside of Australia at capture.com and capture.hk.

How are my digitised photos delivered?

Once scanning is complete, your photos are delivered as high-resolution digital files on a USB drive or via a secure online downloadable link. Confirm the delivery method with your partner shop when you drop off your photos.

Is Capture Australia listed in Google Photos?

Yes. You can find Capture Australia in the Google Photos app import function. In the Google Photos app or website, tap the '+' button, select 'From other places', then choose 'Digitise physical photos' to find us. After we deliver your files via USB or downloadable link, you upload them to your Google Photos account yourself through the app on your own device.

Is the scan quality consistent across all partner shops?

Yes. Every partner shop uses the same Capture Australia proprietary scanning workflow and glare-removal technology, so the output quality is consistent regardless of which location handles the job. Each photo goes through the same multi-layer processing at every shop.

How much does photo scanning cost in Australia?

The cost depends on your situation: the partner shop you use, the size of your collection, whether you need express turnaround, and whether any additional manual steps are involved, such as archival full-page captures or handling unusually fragile prints. Our semi-automated scanning workflow keeps the baseline cost low, because the technology does the heavy lifting on each photo rather than requiring hour-by-hour manual labour. Different partner shops run their own promotions from time to time, and larger collections can qualify for better rates. The best way to get an accurate figure is to contact your nearest partner shop with a rough count of your photos and albums.

Digital Photo Frames for Scanned Photos

Digital Photo Frames: How to Modernise and Display Your Scanned PhotosDon't hide your digitised memories. Display your entire scanned photo collection on a digital frame. Capture Australia helps bring your family's history to life

The hardest part of digitising a photo collection isn't the scanning. It's what happens afterwards. Most scanned collections end up in a folder nobody opens, and is hard to find, which is a strange fate for photos a family has kept in mind for so many years.

A digital photo frame fixes that. It takes the collection off the your smartphone or computer hard drive and puts it back where photos belong: on a shelf, on a wall, in the room where people actually gather.

Why a digital frame beats a printed one

A printed frame holds one photo. A digital frame holds your whole collection and rotates through it, like a slideshow, so a single frame on the kitchen bench can show a wedding from 1971, a first day of school, and last summer's holiday across the same afternoon.

The good ones do this quietly in the background. You load the photos once, and the frame cycles through them on its own. No screen to swipe, no app to open every time you want to see a picture. Some even have a touch screen, for you to go back or zoom in, or interact with to relive that fun or great memory.

How Frameo frames work

Capture works with Frameo, the global leader in digital photo frame operating systems, and it's the one we point families to for a specific reason: you send photos to it over WiFi from anywhere in the world.

Frameo pairs an app on your phone with the physical frame. Set the frame up once on home WiFi, keep it connected, and anyone that has set up this connection can push photos to it from their own phone, wherever they happen to be. A daughter in Melbourne sends a photo to her mother's frame in Sydney, and it appears within seconds. If ever the internet drops, the frame carries on showing everything already loaded, so it works online or offline.

That remote feature is what makes Frameo a family object rather than a gadget. You can set up a parent's or grandparent's frame, load it with their freshly scanned collection, and then keep adding new family photos to it for years, without them ever touching a setting.

Getting your scanned photos onto a frame

Source quality decides how a photo looks on a frame. A phone snap of a print, taken over an album page, tends to look soft and washed out the moment it fills a screen. A proper scan holds its detail. The gap is invisible on a thumbnail and obvious at frame size.

Capture delivers scanned albums as standard JPEG files, the format every digital frame reads. For a Frameo frame, you load them through the Frameo app on your phone. For other frames, the steps are similar: the files transfer from your phone, a memory card, USB thumb drive or a cloud library, depending on the frame.

Because the files are clean, colour-corrected scans rather than phone snapshots of prints, they fill the screen the way the original photo looked, not a faded or glare-streaked version of it.

Frames aren't the only screen

A dedicated frame is the simplest option, but it isn't the only one. Because Capture delivers to Google Photos, the same collection can run as a screensaver on a Google Nest Hub or cast to any Chromecast-enabled TV. It sounds fancy, but with the modern app and smart TVs making things more user friendly, you'll find it should just work.

The files just as happily move across to Apple hardware, iPhone, iPads and MacBooks. Drop them into Apple Photos and they'll play as a screensaver on an Apple TV, or run as a slideshow on an iPad propped on a shelf. The point isn't which device you own. It's that a clean, standard JPEG plays on all of them without fuss.

Start with the photos

A frame is only as good as what's on it, and an empty frame next to a stack of un-scanned albums is a common sight in Australian homes. The albums hold the photos worth showing, and they just need to be digital first.

Capture's partner shops in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane scan albums in place, no removal required, and deliver the files to Google Photos. They are automatically enhanced, modernised, with no glare and no reflections showing, yellowing removed and colours restored. From there, loading a Frameo frame or any screen in the house is a few minutes' work. Our aim is to make it the easiest it can be for all customers to use our service and technology, taking the headache out of your family project. We get comments all the time about how wonderful it is to mix both new and old photos together on the same digital photo frame, bringing to life your beautiful memories.

Find a partner shop near you → Find a Capture partner shop

If your collection isn't digitised yet, see how to keep your photos safe once they're digital, or discover how old photos support family history research. For more ideas, visit Digital Photo Ideas.